284 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol, XIII, 
quite certain they could put a stop to it almost entirely if they chose, simply 
by building their thorn zareebas double the height at present in vogue: but 
no, they prefer to go on from generation to generation building them of just 
such a height thata lion or an active leopard can conveniently jump in 
and out of them. 
The second type is the game-hunting lion, You find him in the most iso- 
lated and unlikely places, many miles from water ; and he seems to adhere to 
a certain locality ora particular beat, although game is at times so scarce there 
that he must often be at his wits’ end for a square meal, This class of lion 
is very difficult to bag, except in a thoroughly good tracking country. Un- 
like the village lion, who is at once attracted to a newly-arrived Kurria, or a 
sportsman’s encampment, and to whom the voice of man is a thing of joy, 
associated in his mind with the presence of fat kine and other delights, the 
game hunter seems .to shun one’s zareeba like a pestilence ; to fight shy of 
baits, and to prefer spending whole nights on the run, now after an Oryx, 
now a Gerenuk, to feeding himself more sumptuously and with much less 
trouble, at your expense, 
After having heard a lion calling all round camp during the early eae 
of the night, I have been out at daybreak to visit the “ties” and have 
found tracks within a few yards of the bait, and within sight of our camp 
fires and have then followed them away for miles, and found that the lion 
had proceeded to hunt other game for the rest of the night. 
Some long hours tracking of this kind with my trusty little Midgan tracker 
boy, Mahomed, have been among the pleasantest of my experiences of So- 
mali shikar, 
The portrait of this young specimen of “jungle produce” is worth sketch- 
ing, though I fear1I can do scant justice to it, We picked him up in this 
wise. My companion was out one morning after Oryx—our first day in a 
new locality—and was tracking up a large herd, when he overtook two Midgans 
(of whom Mahomed was one) bent on the same errand, They were armed 
with the usual Midgan bow and quiver of arrows, and were leading three 
pariah dogs. They accompanied the Doctor for the rest cf the morning, in 
the course of which he wounded an Oryx, and they proved themselves so 
expert in the tracking of it that my companion brought them back to camp, 
and we offered to take one of them and one dog permanently into our service. 
Domestic difficulties presented the elder from accepting, but the younger, 
Mahomed, a slight short youth of about 15, was willing to come, so we took 
him on, tozether with the best of the three dogs, which, however, we had to 
buy. The Doctor already had one Midgan gun-bearer, and asI was short of 
aman at the time Mahomed was told off to follow my fortunes, and most 
invaluable I found him. I can only call to mind one man in my experience 
who could touch him as a tracker and natural shikari; that was a young 
Gond in the Central Proyinces. Both possessed those invaluable attributes 
